Now that I have a GC in Smalltalk, what can I do with it?

Gerardo Richarte and Javier Burroni

Abstract

Continuing with the idea of sharing all we learned in the still going on process of writing a Smalltalk VM in Smalltalk, we'll present some optimizations to the nativizing framework which had an impact in the speed performance of our GarbageCollector written in Smalltalk, and we'll also present interesting uses and tools that could be at hand to every Smalltalk developer only when the GarbageCollector is written in Smalltalk.

During the presentation we'll describe, install and uninstall the performance optimizations to see how they affect the speed of the system, and we'll also demo a few concrete modifications to the GarbageCollector, as examples of how a Smalltalk speaker can take advantage of the possibility to change it. In short: full of demos, all can miserably fail :-)

Bios

Gerardo Richarte:

In the last 20 years Gerardo 'gera' Richarte has been dedicated to computer security. He has spoken in different conferences including BlackHat, CanSecWest and PacSec among others, and taught assembly language and exploit writing classes for private, public and military students. For the last 15 years he's been part of Core Security Technologies, where he was a Sr. Security Consulting, Sr. Security Software Engineer and Reverse-Engineer, Expert Exploit Writer, and has been working in the last years, as researcher and technical leader. During all these years he's published some papers, advisories and open source tools as a humble thank you to the community that has given so much to him.

Gerardo 'richie' Richarte started Smalltalking and Squeaking in 1998 at Leandro Caniglia's MathMorphs class, where he was one of the main creators and implementors of the MorphicWrappers, as well as some other MathMorphs components. In the early days of Squeak he was an active member of the list, where he contributed a few bits of code. Being a member of the original 2001 SqueakNOS team, he awakened the project almost 5 years latter to bring it back to its second incarnation, and get an ESUG award in 2009. Today, he's now officially Smalltalking, and spending a big portion of his time reading and writing assembly, bytecode, and other low level stuff, both inside and outside Smalltalk.

Javier Burroni: In the last 11 years Javier Burroni has worked as part of a team developing information security products, specializing in low level and cross operating system topics, as well as VM implementation and interoperability problems. He has spoken about security and networking at international conferences, and published papers on this subjects. In the last years he has been dedicated to understand and implement a JIT Smalltalk VM written in itself.